stacking pros and cons:
it all depends on which units design you decide to produce.
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To my knowledge, no precise assessment on the amount of collateral damege taken by stacked units (and on the factors that influence it) has ever been determined, or possibily even discussed.
The issue is that combining Weapon AND Armor on the same unit makes it *more expensive* (to produce, that is).
There is no clearly superior approach to this dilemma, it is of course all matter of personal preferences and playing style.
I personally prefer to keep separate offensive and defensive designs as far as I possibly can (until you get Fusion Reactor that is, which totally changes the unit cost opportunity).
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A brief coverage of the issue shoud imho separate the case of infantry units and rover units (of course you can then aventually mix the two in a stack or a task force you assemble to attack)
Infantry chassis:
This might be considered attractive because of its +25% bonus in attacking a base (although when in the field it would suffer if caught in flat/rolling terrain by an enemy rover). Downside is that it lacks the "move initiative" (leving alone Ogie's pet tactic
), thus it must approach the target and sit there to endure the enemy strike before delivering its own.
Imagine you have Impact and Plasma.
A defensive 1-3-1 costs 2 rows.
I don't have the game handy now, but offhand I figure that a 4-1-1 costs 2 rows just as a 2-1-1 (it might be 3)
I don't know about a 4-3-1 (I almost never design such units
), but *for sure* costs more that a 4-1-1.
*Maybe* it might cost 1 row less than the combination of the two separate above units (and 1 mineral to support insted of two for two units)
But production cost and support considerations apart, there is something specific too to be said in the combat deployment of a 4-3-1 vs a 4-1-1 + 1-3-1 combo.
As we said, the 4-3-1 must endure the enmy strike before being able to retaliat. The same for the combo, BUT if the 4-3-1 wins the defense taking partial damage, then the *stacked* combo behaves even better as only the 1-3-1 defender would have damage, while the 4-1-1 would be unscathed and ready to atack at *full* potential.
Should instead the 4-3-1 perish, you'd have lost *at the same time* your attack capability. In case of the stacked combo, only the 1-3-1 defender would have died, and the 4-1-1 would have survived with *partial* collateral damage. The exact amount of that "partial" could make a big difference. But I would offhand say that it usually ranges in the 30-40%.
Having a (collaterally damaged) 60-70% healty 4-1-1 attacker unit is better than having no unit at all. Imho. I wonder how do you see it.
You could object that ONCE you have gone the combo way, the topic was indeed discussing about NOT stacking it, because the concept of "collateral damage" scares you so much.
Well, you are welcome, I invite you to come against me with a 4-1-1 and a 1-3-1, and *spread* them on two different tiles. WHICH one do you think I will attack with my preemptive defense? I will pick and bury your unarmored 4-1-1, and then you can have your barehanded 1-3-1 squat there to endure my successive blows until you bring on another attacker.
Rover chassis:
In this case you will have the initiative of the attack.
But in the same line of reasoning, even if your 4-3-2 wins its initial attack, it will have taken some damage in winning, and its defense value will be reduced for the blow it will have to sustain (and there WILL be a retaliation blow, or adding armor to an attacking rover would be purposeless in the first place).
Having a 4-1-2 and a 1-3-2 instead, will allow the defender to defend at full health, regardless of the partial damage taken by the attacker unit in winning. And again, if you spread them, the retaliation will pick the unarmored attacker, and there would be no use to bring a separate defender altogether.
With rover chassis there is then the not marginal consideartion that while a 4-3-1 is a bit expensive, a 4-3-2 is *outrageusly* more expensive than the two split units! A 1-3-2 costs 3 rows, a 4-1-2 costs 4 rows (IIRC). I don't frankly recall how much a 4-3-2 costs but I'd bet that it costs *at least* 8 rows (more than 3+4=7), and probably even more.
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OF COURSE, you should apply common sense to this all, and adjust to peculiar cases.
For instance if you have 3x 4-1-1 units, and you have to face only one "offensive garrison", you can spread them, as they can hit only one of them, and you'll sacrifice on of your 3 being sure that the other two will be unhurt.
OR, if you have TWO 4-3-1, then it's quite logical to spread them, although you problem would be earlier (in the effort to produce them)
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Thus,
IMHO, cost considerations apart:
- a Best-1-x + 1-Best-x combo is superior in combat to a single Best-Best-x unit
- once you have a combo of separately specialised offensive/defensive units, "in general" it's meaningless to spread them. The very purpose itself of designing and producing off/def specialised units, is to use them stacked indeed.
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